Hello Typophiles,
After my first Arabic font " Adobe Naskh ", please check out my second Arabic font, with very special features.

Zuhair Albazi Naskh is the most advanced OpenType Arabic typeface ever created, based on Ottoman manuscript. This unique typeface contains an unmatched range of features known from the Arabic script. It is not merely a font but an ultimate typesetting and design tool for the Arabic script in classic Naskh style, with letters variants and calligraphic styles, specifically developed to take advantage of the extensive functionality for Naskh Arabic typography. The typeface consists of extreme typographic richness and full Unicode support while giving access to the special features of Naskh style. It faithfully captures the historical Naskh as it evolved from practical calligraphy into the best legible Arabic typography ever designed.

This high-end Arabic typeface is particularly well suited for traditional book typography. The font provides fine typographic control by marrying the latest OpenType technology to traditional calligraphic and typographic models. It contains over 3700 Arabic glyphs, including contextual alternates for letters and marks and language-specific forms. The high quality typeface is character based, almost free of ligatures, as only 9 ligatures are included in 3700 Arabic glyphs. Extra care was taken in the design of all outlines. The graceful curves, rounded terminals, and the contrast between thick and thin strokes are consistent and lively throughout the typeface providing all the correct calligraphic shapes for quality Arabic Naskh.

Some Key features of the typeface:

• Control to use different shape alternates for words to achieve the dissimilation of the same letter through variations and to open up new creative possibilities for advertising, front pages, greeting and business cards.

• Control to use different shape alternates for marks also like dammatan, fatahatan, kasratan etc.

• Control to adjust space between words, normal spacing or condensed Naskh spacing.

• Beautiful swashes (elongated letters) for all words.

• Calligraphic Naskh kashida (Tatweel) upto three levels of elongations, so the Kashida distribution and frequence can be precisely controlled to create Arabic calligraphic documents without a calligrapher.

Brother Aziz Mostafa and Badr Oraby thanks for appreciating the font. I hope you may have observed the font brochure and its features. I am also going to add some more very powerful features to the font.

@Aziz Mostafa, It is an OpenType font but with so much options that anyone may say that it works like a tool. It works well in MS Word and InDesign but I have not checked it with other software.

@Badr Oraby, I will wait for your font BadrJalaal. There are two types of marks in my font close and distant. For the small size text I recommend distant marks while for larger text size the close marks look more beautiful.

@abattis, I think till yet I have not found that OpenType is limited but yes I have found font software and desktop publishing software like MS Word and InDesign much limited or having big bugs.

Muhammad has done a very impressive job, and I was privileged to be able to offer him some technical advice along the way. In addition to the app bugs to which Muhammad refers, there were also challenges getting the font to compile correctly in VOLT due to GPOS table size overruns.

Having a richly featured OpenType naskh font of the kind Muhammad has made also enables one to make some meaningful comparisons between the OpenType and DecoType ACE approaches to the same style. Muhammad's font requirtes 3700 glyphs and a lot of GSUB and GPOS lookups to support only one language (Arabic), and requires the typographer to be knowledgeable and sensitive enough to know how to utilise the many stylistic set features manually to produce various results. DecoType Naskh, on the other hand, uses only 541 glyphs to support all the languages covered by the Unicode Arabic block*, and significant parts of the layout intelligence are handled, with much greater ease and efficiency, by the ACE engine rather than font lookups, while various typographic options are accessible through front-end pre-sets in Tasmeem (alongside further manual control for those who want it).

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* DecoType's recent fonts are even more efficient. Their Nastaliq has only 452 glyphs, and I suspect the Ruqah is even smaller.

I am really thankful to John Hudson for liking and appreciating the font. Without his valuable help I would not have succeeded in preparing such a Masterpiece of Arabic Naskh font.
Indeed DecoType ACE (Tasmeem) is a splendid piece of work. The greatest ease of work in Tasmeem is that it shows all the variables for a word before implementation as compared to my OpenType font in which there is no way to do so as it is just a font not a software or software-plugin. But using different combinations of letter alternates to produce various shapes for a word is very easy in my font as there are only 20 stylistic sets and these 20 sets can be learned easily in only few minutes.

My font also has some advantages over DecoType ACE.

(1) DecoType ACE works only in InDesign while my font works in all the applications that support OpenType Arabic fonts.
(2) My font has a compatible bold style also while DecoType ACE has regular style Naskh only.
(3) The Kashida (Tatweel) insertion and removal is not easy in DecoType ACE as every time you have to go to word shaping interface and make your selection when you are inserting the kashida. Even you can not remove the kashida from a word with Backspace key, instead you have to make your selection again from the word shaping interface. Though it looks very easy in a short work of a single page or few pages but it becomes quite time consuming at longer document level.
While in my font the kashida insertion is very easy by the kashida key and it works in all applications and similarly the kashida can be very quickly removed by the backspace key. Even at a document level the kashida can be easily removed by find and remove command.
(4) In DecoType ACE Marks placement is not very good and in some words the marks placement is even very bad as compared to my font that has a very precise placement of marks and it contains the control to use close marks or distant marks.
(5) In Zuhair Albazi Naskh the user can apply any specific letter shape or mark shape to a complete paragraph or even to a complete document with a single click while in DecoType ACE it is not possible.
(6) The DecoType ACE Naskh looks very beautiful at large size but on document level i.e. at small size it does not look so good. At small size the text looks a bit irregular specially when it contains marks. While Zuhair Albazi Naskh Font's beauty and smoothness remains at its peak whether the text is smaller or larger.

It is important to distinguish and not equate ACE and Tasmeem, in order to be clear what we're talking about. Tasmeem is a plug-in for InDesign that provides a particular user interface for working with the advanced typographic features of ACE fonts via the ACE layout engine. ACE fonts are OpenType fonts with a custom table made use of by the ACE engine, which provides script-grammatical shaping for Arabic text and enables the kind of advanced typographic controls accessible via an interface like Tasmeem. The interface is not the engine.

Regarding the kashida, this is an interesting topic. While the use of the 'kashida key' described by Muhammad is indeed convenient, it involves manually editing the underlying text string in order to affect a change in the appearance of the text. This isn't quite on the level of the old type 1 'expert set' fonts for Latin ligatures, as the 'tatweel' character in Unicode is generally ignored in text search and sort operations, but it is still philosophically counter to the normal distinction between content and display.

Muhammad is incorrect to suggest that use of manual kashida insertion is not supported by ACE and that use of the Tasmeem word shaping interface is the only way to access elongations. What ACE does not permit is insertion of the kashida in places where is it not permitted by script grammar (which varies, around some general rules, according to script style). If a user keys a tatweel character code in such a position, ACE trashes it from the string; hence Tom's term 'trashida'.

There are actually three ways to work with kashida in Tasmeem: the manual method as described above, the word shaping interface, which is really only suitable for precise control of shorter passages of text or display settings (e.g. the very elegant poetry settings in a recent Brill publication), and the text shaping interface that can be used with stylistic presets and parameter controls to sprinkle the kashida in the text.

It should be noted, by the way, that automatic kashida insertion for text justification basically doesn't really work anywhere: the insertion logic is simplistic, not script-grammatical (and definitely not tailored to specific styles as it should be), and incompatible between different apps and vendors. Visually, it works only with flat styles of type with strictly horizontal baseline connections. Since it is applied after text shaping has occurred, it breaks any OpenType font -- such as Muhammad's, MS Arabic Typesetting or Urdu Typesetting and the Aldhabi font -- that uses cursive attachment positioning to capture top-joining and other vertical relationships of Arabic script.

I pointed out this thread to Thomas Milo, and have received permission to post here a passage from his reply that might be helpful:

"
Regarding kashida insertion Albazi seems to be unaware of the text shaper interface, nor does he realize that we have three levels of kashida:

1. soft kashida, designed for large text corpora. It can be sprinkled into the text only with the TextShaper menu, which contains stylistic presets plus an editor with elaborate configuration parameters. The TextShaper can also be used to wipe or reduce kashidas categorically.
2. hard kashida, designed for interactive, visual placement using the WordShaper interface. Hard kashida cannot be wiped or affected by the textShaper interface.
3. U+0640 Taweel, which can be typed as usual, but will be ignored in "illegal", i.e., grammatically impossible positions. With another font such Tatweels become visible agail. Their codes remain in the text stream. The WordShaper menu contains a Text Normalisation sub-menu, that allows for converting Tatweel into hard kashida.

This architecture is necessary because Tatweel is not a normal character and kashida is not a predictable, fixed elongation. Historically, the script grammar for it varies between styles.
"

I congratulate you with this accomplishment. It's fantastic to see the stakes raised in the field of Arabic typography by people who acknowledge the real challenges of Arabic script. This is the kind of ambition and professionalism that's really needed. I am happy to have colleagues like you.

Thomas Milo, thank you for liking the font and for your encouraging comments on my hard work. I have tried to give wide range of features to Arabic users in an opentype font. Your Tasmeem is a marvelous piece of work in Arabic Typography and I hope it will be quite difficult for someone to get ahead of it. The most astonishing thing in your font is its size as very small size give unbelievably huge output.

@ John Hudson and hrant. I am sorry to comment that manual tatweel is not possible in Tasmeem. I was unaware of it as I tested the Tasmeem quite a time ago and at that time I just tried the manual tatweel insertion arbitrarily just in a few words and I think it happened at places where tatweel insertion was not allowed in the software due to script grammar limitation. So I misunderstood it.

Now, after your comments, I once again installed the tasmeem, tested it and found the fact as stated by you. If you could confirm, I have found that manually only a single tatweel can be inserted at the allowed places while word shaping interface allows three levels of tatweel at the same place. Also I have found that at some places the limitation is beyond the script grammar like the word "Hasan" (حسن) as Tasmeem do not allow manual tatweel in it while the script grammar allows it.

If you could confirm, I have found that manually only a single tatweel can be inserted at the allowed places while word shaping interface allows three levels of tatweel at the same place.

Yes. I'm not sure if this is a feature of Tasmeem or of ACE itself, but multiple entries of the kashida character result in a single (medium length) kashida. I would probably have implemented this differently, equating one kashida character to the narrowest kashida, two to the medium, and three to the long, but this seems to me an equivocal decision: there is no standard for kashida behaviour, and hence people implement what makes sense to them, always with the knowledge that, at some stage, one needs to start swallowing additonal kashida characters. In our Aldhabi font for MS, we can accommodate up to 10 kashida characters as a long, ligated kashida stroke; if a user enters 11, 12, 13 etc. kashida characters the stroke doesn't get any longer and the additional kashida character glyphs are swallowed in the display.

I do it during OpenType glyph processing. First I ligate multiple individual kashida glyphs to the longer variant kashida stroke, in descending order of length, longest to shortest. Then, in a separate lookup I ligate the longest kashida stroke plus an additional individual kashida to the longest kashida stroke, which swallows the individual kashida:

kashida.10 kashida -> kashida.10

At present I'm doing this in the 'ccmp' feature, and this works find in MS apps, but kashida ligation done in this way doesn't work in InDesign ME, so I need to see if I can figure out a workaround in another feature.

It means if another font is applied to the same text then the swallowed kashida will re-appear.

In my font I have used a different approach for kashida ligation. Also in my font if the kashida is inserted after three levels then, instead of swallowing, the calligraphic kashida changes to a straight kashida. Similarly if a kashida is inserted at a place where the Arabic Naskh script grammar does not allow kashida then also the straight kashida appear at that place. My font kashida ligation and kashida rules both work 100% in MS Word as well as InDesign.

If you find any shorter way of kashida ligation that work in MS Word as well as in InDesign then please also contribute it with us. Your approach has always helped us a lot.

I have made tatweel alternates in quite a different way at glyph level so my approach is also different. I used the "calt" feature for this purpose and used different lookups for each level of ligation in ascending order like this

Lookup1

behinitial -> behinitial.one
| tatweel

Lookup2

behinitial.one -> behinitial.two
| tatweel tatweel

Lookup3

behinitial.two -> behinitial.three
| tatweel tatweel tatweel

because there are only three levels of ligation in my font. This way will become a bit longer in your font due to 10 levels of ligation in your font but it works in MS Word as well as in InDesign.

You lookup description explains the selection of the alternate letterforms preceding the kashida(s) but not ligation or swallowing of the kashida glyphs themselves. So, for instance, the substitution

behinitial.two -> behinitial.three
| tatweel tatweel tatweel

results in the glyph string

/behinitial.three/tatweel/tatweel/tatweel/

I have similar 'calt' lookups to handle all my letter variant substitutions too (although I've already decomposed to archigraphemes by this point, so I'm handling a generic 'B' initial letter without dots rather than 'beh'). What I am wondering is how you handle the tatweel glyphs themselves.
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This is the sort of thing I am doing with Aldhabi. The elongations are independent strokes of varying length that are designed to flow into contextually selected letterforms. The right side joining of the elongation is a standard shape, allowing the preceding letterform to be selected based on the presence of the elongation. The left side joining of the elongation varies, so I have an elongation stroke of each length for each of eight different left join shapes. All this was worked out by the designer, Tim Holloway. He designed the narrowest elongation of each join shape and the widest, and an intermediate 'standard' elongation, and then I used interpolation to create all the others.

Very nice font with so much ligation. The elongated tatweels are very beautiful and charming. Congratulations, Great work.

What I am wondering is how you handle the tatweel glyphs themselves.

The glyph string really becomes

/behinitial.three/tatweel/tatweel/tatweel/

in my font as described by you.

Actually in my font the tatweel at such places changes to alternate glyph tatweel.alt and the tatweel.alt is an empty glyph with some width. In simple words tatweel.alt glyph is similar to space glyph. While behinitial, behinitial.one, behinitial.two and behinitial.three has the same width i.e. width metrics but having long elongations going far away from glyph width metrics. So their elongations go far crossing the width metrics covering the empty spaces of tatweel.alt

Ah. That's sort of clever but complicated, and doesn't it lead to complexities in the left connection of the elongated initial? An alternative solution for you would be simply to make your elongated initial forms full width and swallow the tatweel glyphs as I so:

behinitial.three tatweel tatweel tatweel -> behinitial.three

That seems simpler, I think, and means that you can apply 'curs' attachment directly from the /behinitial.three/ to a connecting letterforms on the left.

doesn't it lead to complexities in the left connection of the elongated initial?

I did not face any complexity in the left connection as right from the beginning I made the left glyphs accordingly.

An alternative solution for you would be simply to make your elongated initial forms full width and swallow the tatweel glyphs as I so:behinitial.three tatweel tatweel tatweel -> behinitial.threeThat seems simpler, I think, and means that you can apply 'curs' attachment directly from the /behinitial.three/ to a connecting letterforms on the left.

It is also a good approach. Before adding calligraphic tatweels to my font I tested several approaches and I remember I have also tried something like this in the beginning.

behinitial tatweel tatweel tatweel -> behinitial.three

In this case there are at least two benefits. (1) No need to make separate glyph of tatweel.alt (2) direct cursive attachment towards left side letter.

But I adopted the other approach so that the marks can be placed on tatweel.alt and they appear on the the elongated letter accordingly as in the image.

In first line words have a single tatweel, in second line have two tatweels and in third line have three tatweels. The mark length auto-increase with increasing tatweel length and if another mark is placed after first, second or third tatweel then the first mark length auto-decrease accordingly.

If I adopt the above described new approach and make the elongated glyph several components for marks placement then the marks will require a lot of work and much positioning data that is not possible in my font. So in my font the marks placement on tatweel.alt saved me from thousands of mark positions

My approach was a simple one, using FontLab's 'Blend Fonts' function (Tools menu). I created separate .vfb sources for each width of elongation stroke. Then I used the 'Blend Fonts' function to create Multiple Master width sources (one for narrowest to standard elongation, one for standard to widest elongation; it would be possible, of course, to do this with only the narrowest and widest, but Tim wanted more control over the shape in the most common intermediate widths, which correspond to the swash sin). Once I had the Multiple Master sources, I went into FontLab's 'Edit Axis Graph' dialogue (Tools / Multiple Master menu) and set the low and high values to match the actual advance width of the two elongation masters in UPM font units; this allowed me to specify and generate discreet intermediate instances based on precise widths.

I suggest instead of further asking you should test fontlab also. If you have the practical knowledge of font creator then it will not be difficult for you. I have not used font creator so do not know much about it. Also there is much material about fontlab that you can easily find on web. In fontlab you can also copy and paste directly from illustrator. It is one of the most wide spread font tool used by top type designers but it has some limitation.

It allows maximum 6399 glyphs per file or per font. Looking at your ambitions it will not fulfill your need as 6399 is very small number of glyphs for a ligature based Nastaleeq font that may contain much large number of glyphs. In this case you may try Asia Font Studio that support up to 65,535 glyphs per file. It has almost same interface and same functions as Fontlab Studio so if you get satisfied with fontlab then you may start work in Asia Font Studio.

In short, you have to test these software by yourself to find out which one is easy for you and which one gives best output outlines in a font.

@Ryan Maelhorn:What makes this the most beautiful Arabic font? Although it seems to be quite the workhorse as far as allowing users to change things around, overall the outlines look rather lazy and bland to me.

Except for fonts which are limited to special software (InDesign) this is the only Arabic font to properly support the script, instead of taking ugly shortcuts.

Also, since English is not the original poster's first language, I'm willing to allow that the "One of" in the title was intended to apply to "the most beautiful" as well as "the most advanced" (to achieve the proper idiomatic English parallel construction, it should have been "One of the most advanced and most beautiful Arabic OT Naskh Fonts").

I am no judge of Arabic script aesthetics, but the typeface appeared to me to have a pleasing shape with no obvious need for improvement.

Dear Zuhair Albazi
Thank u for your reply. I am trying to work on fontlab and also on asia font studio as u suggested.
Did u have any connection with late Syed Nafees ul Husaini(RA) because I have seen titles of many books written by Shaikh Musa Al Baazi(RA) in beautiful calligraphy of Syed Nafees ul Husaini,

@quadibloc.
John, thank you for liking and appreciating the font and for your nice comments about it. I have corrected the title of the topic according to your suggestion.

@Rashid.
I met two or three times with Syed Nafees Shah (RA), who was one of the biggest calligraphers in the subcontinent. My elder brother Maulana Zubair Albazi has also got khilafah (Ijazah) from him.

Here is a new pdf file, containing Zuhair Albazi Naskh typeface samples, to check the printouts of the font at smaller, document level text size. The text pages contain Regular style as well as Bold style.

About 10 days have passed I have been continuously trying to post a new thread but could not succeeded. It always says 500 server internal error. I also tried with different computers with different net connections and also with other typophile accounts but all in vain. I also tried several times to connect the moderators but there was no outcome. I am able to comment on older posts but unable to create new posts. Please help me to solve the problem.